After playing the hell out of Prototype, I felt obligated to make a comparison somewhere down the line, but that feeling has since passed. These games are just too similar, down to wonky controls and side missions. The criticism I slap down on one easily translates to criticism of the other. If you consider that Prototype was heavily inspired by a recent Hulk game and that you could throw a lot of Spider-Man games into the mix, we're talking about a general superhero problem.
What impressed me the most was that the companies behind Infamous and Prototype approached their subject matter in a fresh way. Instead of banking on an already known superhero, the development houses created characters and narratives from scratch to deliver their high ambition games. Short, comic-booky cutscenes littered each game and the player has to learn about what's going on in the background through these plot morsels. It's a good idea, and each game turned out to be a solid effort in the end, so their creativity didn't end up in vain.
The criticism, for the sake of article flow, also begin here. As ambitious as the projects were, I felt that the storylines were a bit of a let-down in some ways. With an entire city available for playground needs, plot becomes scarce and amounts to checkpoints in the game. This is sort of the norm, and there's nothing immediately wrong with that. In an RPG, you generally have time to roam until you choose to approach the next step in the ongoing story, and that's what you get in these games. It is something that I think needs changing, and I was hoping that these games would provide a little of that evolution.
The reason I say this is because they had a golden opportunity to do something truly revolutionary with their storytelling. The gameplay in each game is heavily flawed in many respects, and the storyline should have picked up the slack. Many entertainment houses are trying to cash in on the superhero, and even comic, tag. Heroes, Lost, and Push (hey, I liked it) have all tried their hand in some way at creating new comic book experiences outside of print, and they generally succeeded while introducing something new from a creative standpoint rather than tried and true legacy heroes that litter every aspect of entertainment. Games have lacked this, despite being the perfect venue to evolve the narrative beyond a set story.
Spider-Man 2 and Batman: Arkham Asylum were outstanding, don't get me wrong, but they were more fun than evolutionary, and worse, the pinnacle of superhero gaming. Beyond these titles, you get Spider-Man 3 or Web of Shadows, Ultimate Alliance, Iron Man, Superman 64, Turok, etc. Each game varies on the fun-factor scale from good to terrible, but each one was significantly castrated in some way. Even Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, a huge release, amounted to little more than a pseudo-RPG designed around unlocks more than anything, fetching junk, mindlessly and unimaginatively plowing through enemy waves, and trying to be Diablo while having none of its depth.
Thing is, comic books may be devoted to unbelievable stories of skill and superpowers, but they're also about a multi-layered story. Civil War was an event that hit every major title on the shelves, and you basically had to pick and choose what characters you wanted to follow through the whole ordeal or sacrifice a paycheck. That was just for one week of publications, nevermind the saga in its entirety.
So when I say that these games missed a golden opportunity, I mean it. There was a great opportunity here to develop a huge, massive world of characters and motivations that didn't necessarily need to resolve itself within each games' timespan. I understand that there are some exceptions, but those are nothing compared to what could have been done.
Why are games perfect for this? A movie or TV series needs to focus itself to advance a narrative. Comics need to do this as well, but there are multiple opportunities each week to drop a little bit of the complete story across dozens of titles. There's flexibility there. Games don't need to focus themselves so much, and sandbox games such as these designed around player freedom have even less of a reason to provide a singular focus through 100% of the game.
So what happens when a developer half-assedly tries to expand the game world? Fetch quests, the bane of these games and one of the worst flaws that a superhero game can have. I loved the Web of Intrigue idea that Prototype had, but it really amounted to a prolonged fetch quest that I felt had more potential. Each game has too many fetch quests already. Each game had tokens to discover, scattered along the rooftops of each respective city, and you were always chasing something minute down. The problem is that there is such little reward and less imagination involved. You're generally hunting down side-mission markers on a map for some reason or another, and your reward is usually a token, medal, or a mission. While the first two are just unavoidable nowadays, the mission part of each game is terrible. No matter what, you will play the same mission dozens of times before the end of the game. It amounts to a bad ripoff of Spider-Man's "citizen in distress" side-missions.
Yet, you're not doing anything other than collecting. There is a battle for territory going on in both games, but I can't think of a time where I completed a side mission and thought that I understood the game world better. I usually felt the exact opposite, feeling like I was mindlessly grinding until all of the side-missions were done so that they wouldn't be locked away from me when I tried to advance the actual story. Specifically, in Infamous, there is a mission called "Spy Games" where you follow a grunt for a few blocks until he drops off a package. You'd think I'd actually be spying on something, but I was actually just following this grunt to "fetch" his tokens when he dropped them. I didn't spy on an enemy to gain story insight; I spied on him for shiny objects. Prototype doesn't bother to avoid this either, asking the player to do missions involving what you normally do around the city, but doing it in a limited space instead.
Oh, and the controls are clunky in both games. Not unplayable, just clunky.
My real beef is just story related, though. All that I've said doesn't begin to describe what the games could have offered. Sure, each will get its sequel and get a chance to expand the characters, but so much more could have happened. A lot was going on in the background of both games (or at least, a lot COULD have been going on), but it was all related to the immediate story. Where's the imagination to go beyond that? If a developer creates a comic-inspired game, then maybe it would benefit them to, well, actually get their inspiration from comics. Comics aren't just about the superpowers. I appreciate Infamous trying to give Son of Electro a black and white choice on the matter, but a good story begins when you take a character, place him into a situation, and see how he reacts to a situation. Marvel Comics in particular deal with this as their MO. Testuo-Hulk destroying everything is hardly character development. Tthough, Hulk is a hard character to write a story for because of this.
If sequels are going to be made, then I implore both Sucker Punch and Radical Entertainment to drop the crappy side-missions and go read some comic books for inspiration. Even if the depth isn't that interesting, comic books at least have it. These games don't. It wouldn't stop me from recommending them to other gamers, but story depth is the difference between an 80% metascore and a classic game that goes beyond grading systems.
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